wowwikifandomcom-20200223-history
Leveling a warlock
So you want to level a Warlock, and want to know the fastest and most efficient method? You've come to the right place. Note that this article only discusses talent choices and play style, and not specific warlock class quests. Note: these notes were made pre-patch 3.02 and therefore do not take into account the major talent changes that occurred at that time. Solo vs Group When you start a Warlock, like starting any other class, it is always quicker to level with a second person. The first level or two it will hurt your wallet as you wont get as much gold, but the latter on the questing speeds up in groups without such an effect. In fact it can seem to reverse. However who you level with effects how you play. As such, while this guide will go in depth into soloing, the most common way to level, this section will do a small bit into who you are leveling with. Now the first, to simplify things, when leveling there are four kinds of partners, tanks, healers, dps and other Warlocks. The reason why leveling with another warlock is separate shall become obvious in a moment. Now while it is relatively simple to work out what you should do if leveling with one other, or a group of one of these four groups, leveling with a mixture makes things more complicated and as such this short guide cannot cover it. Now when leveling with a Tank, Affliction spec is worthless. The mobs are too weak and the tank will kill them before you can. Your best bet is to go maybe two layers into the Affliction tree to get Improved Life Tap, then go straight down Destruction. Demonology isn't bad either, but as the Felguard's Tanking abilities are rather useless, this will just decrease downtime. When leveling with a dps, Affliction is stll worthless (the possible exception being the Shadow Priest). They will pull aggro if you try to drain, tank, and kill the mob before the DoTs are finished. As the dps has downtime anyway, going to get Improved Life Tap also loses its benifits. Best bet is destruction, until the Felguard becomes available. Then Demonology. The Felguard will tank for you both. When leveling with a Healer, none of the trees have any great benefit, although Affliction is worse then the others, due to making the Healer kind of redundant. Best bet is to do Destruction again, its high burst DPS will protect your Healer. Now leveling with another Warlock Affliction is the way to go. Talents like Soul Siphon and Malediction mean you bounce off each other and make each other more powerful. Levels 1-9 When you first start out, all you have is Shadow Bolt and Demon Skin. Demon Skin is a self-buff that gives you a small amount of armor and health received by spells increased by 20%. Demon Skin should ALWAYS be up. At the beginning, Shadow Bolt is going to be your primary damage spell, but this will change later on. The first time you see your class trainer, he will give you a quest to acquire your Imp, which will be your first demon. Do the quest as soon as you can, as he provides very considerable DPS for the first few levels. Don't wait any longer than level 4 to get your Imp. Once you get your Imp, Immolate, and Corruption Your cast rotation should be something like this; *Immolate *Send in Imp while casting *Corruption *Spam Shadow Bolt or Wand until death For those of us that use Macros, type this; /petattack nocombat /castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Corruption Then spam Shadow Bolt or Wand until death Both this Casting Rotation and Macro both get your Imp in play as quick as possible and at the same time not let it pull aggro, something that beginner Warlocks can have trouble with. If you are going to use the wand instead of Shadow Bolt a Highly recommended wand is the . If a target is nearly dead at the end of a Shadow Bolt or Wand (Less then 10% or so) then just let the DoTs finish it off. At level 8, put Curse of Agony between Immolate and Corruption in your rotation to give; *Immolate *Send in Imp while casting *Curse of Agony *Corruption *Spam Shadow Bolt or Wand until death or /petattack nocombat /castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Curse of Agony, Corruption Second Opinion: The Curse of Agony does slightly greater DPS if the dot is completely used. However seeing that most of its damage is caused in the last 1/4 of the dot it can give you a higher DPS at this stage of the game to put Corruption first. When creatures start living longer then it is more worth it. Levels 10-24 At level 10, you get the quest to summon a Voidwalker, as well as the spell Drain Soul, which will be used to create Soul Shards. Soul Shards are required to summon all your demons except for the Imp, as well as making Healthstones and Soulstones. For now, you will use your Voidwalker as your own personal tank. Change the sequence of the dots in your macro to Curse of Agony, Corruption, Immolate. The idea being that you start your damage out slow, to allow your Voidwalker to generate some aggro. Make sure that the Voidwalker is set to auto-cast Torment. Second Opinion: Having to start out slowly can decrease your DPS and will increase leveling time slightly. I only held the Voidwalker until 20 when I got the Succubus. At this point, you get your first talent points. The three talent trees for the Warlock are Affliction, Demonology, and Destruction. Affliction mostly focuses on debuffs, including your DoTs (excluding Immolate). Demonology provides a lot of buffs for your demon, and Destruction concentrates on burst damage. All of them have their merits, though for the first 50 levels, Affliction is the way to go. Demonology relies too much on your demon, but the performance of the demons tends to fall a bit behind at around level 30-35. Destruction can kill mobs much faster than Affliction, but at a higher mana cost, meaning having to drink more often. Overall, the extra downtime with destruction is more expensive than the higher damage. Your first 5 points should be put into Improved Corruption. Then get Improved Life Tap and Soul Siphon. When you reach level 14, you gain Drain Life. At face value, Drain Life doesn't seem that great. It's the most mana-expensive damage dealing spell in the game. The mana cost is higher than the damage done at rank 1, and at higher ranks, the mana cost is equal to the damage done. However, it is very important to note that it HEALS you for the damage done, and Warlocks have the unique ability of Life Tap, which converts HP into mana, and once you get Improved Life Tap, you actually get more mana back than HP lost. The result being that as long as Drain Life isn't overhealing, then casting Drain Life followed by Life Tap actually causes you to have a net gain of mana, while simultaneously damaging your target! Once you add the Soul Siphon talent, your Drain Life becomes even more efficient. Soul Siphon increases the damage (and therefore the HP generated) by Drain Life by 4% for every Affliction debuff on the target. Since you should already have Curse of Agony and Corruption on your target (Remember, while Immolate is a DoT, its not an Affliction effect - its Destruction!), that means your Drain Life will always do 8% more damage. If you have more Warlocks with you, Soul Siphon becomes that much better! With a pair of Curses and Corruptions, Drain life will have its effect increased by 16%! This guide will assume you spend most of the time soloing, so your next pick should be Improved Drain Soul. Now, get into the habit of using Drain Soul on EVERY mob before it dies. Even go so far as to stop casting a Drain Life to use Drain Soul. As long as you or your demon gets the killing blow, you will gain 15% of your mana back. This of course will generate a lot of extra shards, so I recommend using a UI mod that will automatically destroy extra shards. I personally use Necrosis. At level 18, you gain the ability to create Soul Stones. You should ALWAYS have a Soul Stone active on yourself while soloing. Sometimes, things take a turn for the worse and you find yourself dead. Having the ability to self-resurrect every 30 minutes is handy. And if you're in the habit of using Drain Soul on every mob like you should be, the shard cost is insignificant. At level 20, you get Demon Armor. Demon Armor replaces Demon Skin. It does everything Demon Skin does better, plus it adds Shadow Resist. Once you get Demon Armor, there is no reason to keep Demon Skin on your action bar. Again, just like Demon Skin, it should ALWAYS be active. Your next talent choice should be 3/3 Fel Concentration, allowing you to Drain-tank effectively, which is a very useful technique. This will give you a build like this at level 24. At level 20 get your Succubus. The quests are annoying but she is worth it. Her DPS is higher then the Imps until at least level 30 probably 40, she can continue to attack after she runs out of mana, and seduce will save you from over pulls and instance Wipes. I owe that Succubus more then anything else. If you can't stand the Voidwalker at this stage, Change your Cast rotation to the Drain Tanking one at the end of this section and swap the Voidwalker for the Succubus. Around this time you should try to get a Glyph of Corruption for your Major Glyph slot. When this Glyph Procs you get an instant Shadow Bolt. It also stacks with Nightfall (Warlock talent), making this a very useful Glyph. If you get this Glyph, put Corruption on BEFORE Curse of Agony, giving it more chance to proc. At this point you Casting rotation should be; *Send Voidwalker in. *Curse of Agony *Corruption (Warlock ability) *Immolate *Life Tap (If full Heath) *Drain Life (If Glyph of Corruption is acquired use Shadow Bolt when it Procs) *Drain Soul OR if Drain Tanking already *Immolate *Send Succubus in *Curse of Agony *Corruption (Warlock ability) *Life Tap (If full Heath) *Drain Life (If Glyph of Corruption is acquired use Shadow Bolt when it Procs) *Drain Soul And for Macro people; /petattack nocombat /castsequence reset=target/combat Curse of Agony, Corruption, Immolate, and second macro /cast Life Drain Life Then Drain soul at death. and for Drain Tankers /petattack nocombat /castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Curse of Agony, Corruption and second macro /cast Life Drain Life Then Drain soul at death. Levels 26-29 At this point, if you haven't given up already, you've probably noticed your Voidwalker doesn't hold aggro very well anymore. This is why we picked Fel Concentration. We are going to get rid of the Voidwalker and move to the Drain Tanking cast rotation mentioned above. Now that we're not worried about letting our Voidwalker build threat before we start dealing damage, we want to change our dot macro to cast Immolate first. This is because it has a 2 second cast time, which is 'free' before the mob is hit by something, so we can get more spells in if we cast it first. This time is perfect, if you aren't using Macro's, to set the pet on the Target. Your next talent can either be Amplify Curse or another damage talent like Improved Curse of Agony. While Amplify Curse use to be practically worthless, except as a Damage Booster in PvP, its ability now can increase your Haste after curses. However if you get it or not depends if you want Haste, or Damage. If you don't have a Lag adjusting mod like Quartz, Amplify Curse is not so good. Next, take 3/3 Suppression. An equal level mob has a 4% chance to resist a spell, and those three talents cut that down by 3%, improving damage. They also reduce the mana cost of all of your affliction spells, which is 90% of the ones we're using, to improve efficiency even further. If you've picked up some gear with Spellpower, then Empowered Corruption is a worthy investment, otherwise put the points in Nightfall for extra damage, especially if you have Glyph of Corruption. Now defiantly switch Corruption and Curse of Agony Once you get this, change Your level 30 talent point should definitely be Siphon Life giving something like this. Note on Grim Reach - many recommend this, but our spell order at this level is to open with Immolate, which isn't affected by Grim Reach, so it's mainly wasted. Later on when we get Unstable Affliction to open with it may come in handy, but not now. Your Cast rotation now should be; *Immolate *Send Pet in *Corruption (Warlock ability) *Siphon Life *Curse of Agony *Life Tap (If full Heath) *Drain Life (Use Shadow Bolt When Glyph of Corruption or Nightfall Procs) *Drain Soul And with Macro /petattack nocombat /castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Corruption, Siphon Life, Curse of Agony and second macro /cast Life Drain Life Then Drain soul at death. Levels 30-39 First pick up your mount, which as a warlock you get for free! Here things get iffy. On one hand some say the Imp has better DPS at this level. Others say the Succubus still beats it for up to ten more levels. This partly depends on your gear and personal preference. When in doubt, choose the Succubus, its seduce can save your life. Continue to fight the way you did before, DoTing up your target and then spamming Drain Life, with a Drain Soul thrown in before the mob dies. A great place to pick up gear is in the Scarlet Monastery. Whitemane's Chapeau, Inquisitor's Shawl and the Hypnotic Blade are some of the highlights. At this point the talents become a bit lackluster. Amplify Curse and Curse of Exhaustion can come in handy when kiting, as can Improved Fear if you use a lot of Fear to keep mobs under control. A single point in Shadow Embrace counts as an affliction effect for Soul Siphon as well as boosting your dot damage, but requires a Shadow Bolt to apply it, which we haven't been casting so far unless Nightfall or Glyph of Corruption proc. This may be a good time to put points into Empowered Corruption regardless of your spellpower - even if you don't have much now you will later. Your talents between 34 and 39 should definitely go into Shadow Mastery. Almost all of the damage you're doing is shadow damage, so this is very nearly a flat 15% increase in damage dealt and life drained. Outstanding! Your build will probably now look something like this. Your Cast Rotation should not have changed these last ten levels. Only your Pet if you change to a Imp from a Succubus. Levels 40-49 Put the next talent point into Dark Pact. Dark Pact is an extremely powerful spell when used correctly. There are two ways to continue, you can either use your Imp as a mana battery or a Felhunter. If using an Imp, we put him on passive remove the /petattack line from your DoT macro. While not casting firebolt his mana regeneration is quite impressive. Alternatively, we can put 2/2 in Improved Felhunter, making his Shadow Bite ability give him a great deal of mana, which we can then Dark Pact for ourselves. Lifetap will now only be used to keep your HP below 100% so that Drain Life's healing isn't wasted. If you're confident managing a pet then the Felhunter is the way to go. Second Opinion: Both the Felhunter and Imp are very useful Mana Batteries, and both have good ups and downs. While the Fel Hunter option is good, it wastes two talent points. Spell Lock and Devour Magic are not very useful at least half the time (This changes in Outland and changes back in Parts of Northred), Shadow Bite is not a bad move, but Fel Intellect is questionable compared with Blood Pact of the Imp. Also, dispite popular belief, the Imp can be used in SOME combat and still be a very good Mana Battery. You have two options with this. A) You can send the Imp in once every two battles, or B) You send your Imp in 'half way' though the battle. Option B is the better one but requires far mores skill then Option A, as the 'half way' though point is not exactly half way and varies depending on mob level, level difference between you and the mob, and if this is just you soloing or an Instance or Raid environment. Honnestly all the options have their ups and downs and if you are going to spend the points in Improved Felhunter or are on a PvP server, the Felhunter is likely the way. However less skilled (Or More skilled as the case may be) and those that are raiding, the Imp is the better option. Now, take 5/5 Contagion, 2/2 Improved Howl of Terror, and 2/3 Malediction if you didn't take 2/2 Improved Felhunter, giving you this at level 49. Your cast Rotation should be Imp *Immolate *Corruption (Warlock ability) *Siphon Life *Curse of Agony *Life Tap (If full Heath) *Drain Life (Use Shadow Bolt When Glyph of Corruption or Nightfall Procs) *Drain Soul *Dark Pact Felhunter *Immolate *Send Felhunter in *Corruption (Warlock ability) *Siphon Life *Curse of Agony *Life Tap (If full Heath) *Drain Life (Use Shadow Bolt When Glyph of Corruption or Nightfall Procs) *Drain Soul *Dark Pact As macros: Imp: /castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Corruption, Siphon Life, Curse of Agony and second macro /cast Life Drain Life Felhunter: /petattack nocombat /castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Corruption, Siphon Life, Curse of Agony and second macro /cast Life Drain Life Levels 50-59 Right now presents a major fork. At level 50, you could respec to Demonology and get a Felguard. The Felguard is a very powerful demon. He has more DPS than the Succubus and more threat-producing ability than the Voidwalker, with almost as much survivability. He makes a great tank for yourself. However, I would highly not recommend going Felguard until level 57 so you can get Improved Lifetap, unless you have a very significant amount of damage gear stacked. If you DO decide to go Felguard, I recommend this spec. Then, change your DoT macro to Curse of Agony, Corruption, Immolate, and add the /petattack nocombat back in. /petattack nocombat /castsequence reset=target/combat Curse of Agony, Corruption, Immolate Otherwise, take Unstable Affliction and change your DoT macro to put it right after Immolate. /castsequence reset=target/combat Immolate, Unstable Affliction, Siphon Life, Curse of Agony, Corruption If you went Felguard, use the macro to send the Felguard in to attack and put the dots up, then use Drain Life and Drain Soul. If you've stayed Affliction then you now have a great many dots and you may benefit from a change in playstyle. Against tough mobs just use your DoT macro to put up the DoTs, then use Drain Life until the mob is about to die, then use Drain Soul to proc Improved Drain Soul. However against mobs your own level you will likely find that the combined action of your dots AND drain life will kill the mob long before your dots have run their course, which is mana inefficient. You may find that pulling multiple mobs and kiting them all with fear, howl, death coil and curse of exhaustion while your dots kill them is overall faster and more efficient. Failing that, take Immolate and Curse of Agony out of your cast Rotation. This shall get rid of the need of Curse of Exhaustion and is easier, but is slower when you need to grind mobs for a Quest. Level 60+ The main new thing at this point is the level 51 talents. Haunt further increases the damage of your already formidable DoTs. It also allows you to apply Shadow Embrace to the target much more easily, so you may find respecing into that talent useful. Chaos Bolt is the 51 point talent in the destruction tree, which is a big boost to your damage dealing capability, however it's not enough to make destruction a competitive choice for leveling and you're better off staying with affliction or demonology unless you do a lot of instances. Metamorphosis is a useful 'oh no' button when soloing, and is also on a short enough cooldown to be used whenever it's up for a 20% damage increase for 30 seconds every 3 minutes - a decent increase overall. You will probably find however that spending those points in low level affliction talents like Improved Life Tap and Improved Drain Soul first will be more useful for leveling, in which case you won't get metamorphosis until nearly 70. At level 62 you will obtain Fel Armor, which is a generally superior armor spell than Demon Armor and should generally be used instead. Notes Shard bags When soloing, there's no reason to keep more than a few shards with you, so I would recommend just using regular bags, and using an addon to automatically destroy extra shards. The other curses Curse of Weakness does not provide enough of a damage reduction to warrant the loss of DPS. You get Rank 5 Curse of Weakness at level 42, which reduces their attack power by 123, which means about 8.8 DPS. At that level, your Drain Life will be healing you for 41 HPS, not including Soul Siphon, Shadow Mastery, or any spell damage. Curse of Recklessness boosts their DPS, while reducing their armor. Armor does not reduce damage from spells at all, so Recklessness does you no good. It DOES make the target unable to flee, but usually that's not a problem anyways. Note that while using the Felguard, Recklessness DOES improve the damage done by your pet and thus permits him to hold agro better. However, you may deal more damage with Curse of Agony depending upon your gear. As such, the choice is typically a personal or gear dependent choice as to go with Agony or Recklessness. Curse of Elements is great if you have a Shadow priest or Mage with you, or if you need more damage from your Shadow Bolts while running a 5-man or raid. However, while solo-ing, you're typically better off using Curse of Agony for more DPS. Curse of Tongues use this curse against caster mobs to significantly reduce their DPS towards you. Also since casters are generally easier to kill, replacing curse of agony with curse of tongues is not really a problem. Gear recommendations For an Affliction or Destruction spec, you mainly want "...of the Eagle" gear, though "...of Stamina" and "...of Shadow Wrath" are good. You want to find a good balance of Stamina, Intellect, Spirit and Spell/Shadow Damage. Spirit was once completely unnecessary as a Warlock, but patch 3.0.2 changed Fel Armor to increase Spell power by X +30% of your spirit. Spell critical strike rating also was boosted, allowing all damage over time spells to Crit on a 'per-tick' basis. The most important thing to remember is that for a Warlock, HP = mana, so if you have to choose between 10 stamina and 10 intellect, go for the stamina. However, gimping your intellect also means your spell crit chance will be lowered and the mana recall of the Improved Drain Soul talent becomes less potent, so again, there is some balance to be found. Note that Demonology spec'd warlocks rely more on Stamina than Intellect. This is because the Felguard receives a portion of that Stamina and this, in turn, gives the Warlock +spell damage. Thus, "... of Stamina" gear is typically preferred over "... of the Eagle" gear in this case. The full Netherweave item set offers excellent +spell damage and a high level of Stamina and will work well to gear up for Kara and heroics. Once you can run heroics and Kara, slowly replace the Netherweave set with T4 or gear from your marks of Justice as better pieces become available. "God of Death Mode" Some affliction warlocks choose to spend their time while leveling collecting +Spell Crit and +Spell Dmg over other stats. The goal is to maximize spell damage as early as possible (See external links below for suitable armor). The advantage of doing so in favor of Stamina and Intellect is that it boosts the damage and healing of drain life which offsets the loss of health and mana. A skilled warlock should be able to balance out his life-tapping and life draining to keep himself over 50% in both health and mana at all times, thus rendering large amounts of either unnecessary due to having no downtime anyways. If enough damage is accumulated, then a phenomenon the originall writer of this section called "God of Death Mode" appears. In GoDM the combined damage of Corruption, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life, and the occasional Haunt is enough to kill an enemy, as a result a warlock can cast 3 instant casts while moving between targets to rapidly kill enemies. This allows the warlock to take on 4-12 enemies (depending on level and gear), while sometimes draining life on one enemy to maintain his health, (although it is not always necessary thanks to siphoned health, and later, Haunt). This is a much faster method of grinding and questing since there is no time wasted stopping to cast or on spell push back. Dark pact greatly facilitates this due to no longer having to worry about using health for mana. This form of grinding is commonly called "Drain Tanking", and is similar to AoE Grinding of Tankadins and Frost mages, but requires more changes of focus. The cons of this style of grinding, especially at higher levels, is that it requires complete focus on several mobs and ones own life total, and especially important in Outland and Northrend, leaves the Warlock more open to ganking than usual. External links * EU WoW forums * US WoW forums * Warlock @ Wikispaces - A warlock-specific wiki * Blood Pact - weekly warlock feature at WoW Insider * Thottbot Armors - Cloth Armour Levels30 to 40 with +Spell Damage * Thottbot Armors - Cloth Armour Levels30 to 40 with +Shadow Damage * Warlocks Den - Forum Specifically For Warlocks Category:Guides Category:Warlocks